Refurbishing an Old Laptop

Introduction

My wife typically used an HP laptop running Windows 10. This laptop is probably about three years old now. Unfortunately she dropped it off the bed onto a cement floor (she claims one of the dogs pushed it off the bed, but I’m suspicious). She actually broke its fall with her foot which is very bruised now, and then it hit the floor after her foot. The laptop then stopped working. She took the laptop to a coffee shop and spilled coffee on it. This didn’t help. She then gave it to me to see if I could get it working. I took it apart to see if it was just a matter of some wires coming loose. Sadly this wasn’t the case. This blog article recounts my attempts to disassemble and repair the laptop, which I successfully accomplished. I’m writing this article on said laptop, while my wife now uses my MacBook Air.

Diagnosing the Problem

On bootup the laptop displayed a text message prompt saying no boot device present. To me this meant that the screen and processor were still working and that the likely problem was the hard drive. After all the harddrive is mechanical with moving parts and likely to be damaged by a shock such as hitting the floor (or a foot). So my first thought was to take it apart and ensure the cables connecting the harddrive were in place.

Opening the Case

It turns out an HP laptop is held together by a lot of screws and many of the screws are hidden behind plastic plugs, the laptop’s feet and various other sneaky bits of plastic. Plus there is a bead of glue around the case that needed to be broken. My first attempt to remove all the screws didn’t allow me inside. Fortunately for doing DIY repairs, there is YouTube. Doing a quick search revealed lots of videos on opening HP laptops and showed a lot of complaining about how HP makes this unnecessarily complex. Anyway watching one of the videos revealed to me where to look for the additional screws (behind some nondescript covers) and allowed me to get the case open.

I removed the hard drive, made sure all the cables were snug and put it back together. And the same result. So I assumed the harddrive was either physically broken or the boot sectors had somehow been erased. So I thought I may as well try installing Ubuntu Linux and repurpose the laptop as a Linux machine. After all running Windows 10, the laptop has been getting slower and slower, so giving up on Windows 10 seemed like a good idea.

Installing Ubuntu Linux

I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu Linux for desktop computers. And then installed this onto a USB key to make a bootable USB with Linux. I did this on a really old AMD Windows 7 laptop. Its slow but it’s always been reliable and since I’ve uninstalled nearly everything from it, it works fairly well. Anyway Ubuntu has really good instructions on how to do this at their website. You just download the ISO image and then use the Rufus utility program to copy it to the USB making it bootable.

I then put it in the damaged laptop and booted it up. At this point I could run Ubuntu Linux from the USB or run the Ubuntu installation program. That both of these worked gave me more confidence that the only problem was the laptop’s hard drive. Anyway I went ahead and tried to install Ubuntu Linux, which goes quite a long way before it finally tries to format the hard drive. This failed. So I concluded the harddrive was physically damaged and useless.

Fortunately I have a couple of other laptop hard drives lying around from even older laptops which I could try. The first one I tried didn’t work, so I guess that one is toast as well. But the second one I tried worked. The Ubuntu installation program was able to format the drive and the installation finished successfully. My impression is that installing Linux is now even easier than installing Windows. It didn’t ask too many questions. The screens were simple and easy to understand.

Now I had the laptop restored. Even using the old harddrive, my impression is that the laptop is much faster now running Ubuntu. Of course now I don’t need to run all that Windows stuff that slows computers down so much (like Windows Defender).

Adding Programs

Ubuntu, like Raspbian is based on Debian Linux so anything I’ve blogged about installing things on my Raspberry also works pretty much the same. Plus Ubuntu comes with Firefox, LibreOffice and a number of other useful programs already installed. I was able to quickly add Chrome, Macchanger, Gimp and Tensorflow. For amateur radio there is a program called Chirp that can be used to program most radios. I never got Chirp to talk to my radio from my MacBook due to supposed driver incompatibilities with the USB to serial cable. But when I added Chirp to Ubuntu, it just worked and communicated with my radio no problem, first try.

With my MacBook I use an external drive to hold my photo library since its so large. I use one that is formatted for the MacOS filesystem, so I wasn’t sure it would work connected to Ubuntu, but when I plugged it in, Ubuntu recognized it and automatically mounted it with no problems. I imagine this is since both operating systems are Unix based and their file systems are compatible. I’ve never tried to make this work with Windows, because the instructions are rather daunting and require quite a bit of extra software to be installed.

Summary

The end result of all this is that I have a new refurbished laptop which I’m now using as my regular laptop running Ubuntu Linux. My wife is happily continuing writing her novels on the MacBook Air. And at least for now we don’t need to buy a new laptop. Perhaps we will down the road if we see a really good deal, but it isn’t an emergency. I never feel rushed to buy a new computer since they keep getting better all the time, plus prices are bit high right now because of the run on graphics cards by people doing BitCoin mining. Might be nice to let this run its course first.

One Response

I recently installed Mint on one of my home laptop, a 10-year-old Acer, and a work laptop, a 7-year-old HP which I am using as my surveillance cameras viewer. Both experiences were painless and self-progressing, especially after having lived through the era of getting IBM DB2 and a certain ERP package to run on Red Hat 6.
(enjoy your blogs)